The codenames for every major Debian release are named after characters from Pixar’s Toy Story franchise. Debian’s unstable release is fittingly named after Sid, an unstable character from the Toy Story movies.

  •  superkret   ( @superkret@feddit.org ) 
    76•23 days ago

    I love the Linux world’s tradition of less serious names, in general.

    I guess when the OS is free, you don’t need to get the marketing people involved as much.
    The kernel was almost named Freax. Then there’s GNU, Slackware, KDE which was originally the Kool Desktop Environment, The GIMP (released 1 year after Pulp Fiction), …
    It’s often due to the devs creating it as a hobby project and giving it a light-hearted name to show it’s nothing professional or important - and then it becomes important later.

    My favorite right now is RebeccaBlackOS, which is the only current distro built around Wayland’s reference compositor Weston, showcasing all the capabilities Wayland has.
    Unlike Hannah Montana Linux, it has no Rebecca Black theming at all. It’s just called that because the dev is a fan of hers.

    •  curry   ( @curry@programming.dev ) 
      19•22 days ago

      It made me wince when Android did away with its dessert based codenames and now they’re just ‘Android 12’ etc. It really went corporate after that direction.

      And please tell me RebeccaBlackOS shows a cool popup or console message every Friday.

    •  IsoKiero   ( @IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz ) English
      11•22 days ago

      GNU

      Which stands for ‘GNU is not Unix’. Also ‘less’ (which is more). Pine is(was) Program for Internet News and Email and the FOSS fork is ‘Alpine’ or ‘Alternatively Licensed Program for Internet News and Email’. And there’s a ton more of wordplays and other more or less fun stuff on how/why things are named like they are.

      •  superkret   ( @superkret@feddit.org ) 
        9•22 days ago

        The name KDE was intended as a wordplay on the existing Common Desktop Environment, available for Unix systems.[6] CDE was an X11-based user environment jointly developed by HP, IBM, and Sun through the X/Open consortium, with an interface and productivity tools based on the Motif graphical widget toolkit. It was supposed to be an intuitively easy-to-use desktop computer environment.[7] The K was originally suggested to stand for “Kool”, but it was quickly decided that the K should stand for nothing in particular. Therefore, the KDE initialism expanded to “K Desktop Environment” before it was dropped altogether in favor of simply KDE in a rebranding effort in 2009.[8]

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE

        (TIL the creator of KDE studied at the same university as me!)

        •  bilouba   ( @bilouba@jlai.lu ) 
          2•22 days ago

          So cool! Thank you for your reply! Do you know him personally? (nevermind, I missed the TIL) I have so much good things to say about this project from my noob perspective. I wish I could contribute some day!